Here’s an interesting item. I have heard that there are arguments abroad about this on the interwebs, that if a tournament, to wit, Rather Large Bronx, is set in its own time zone, it must somehow be at fault.
Jeez Louise.
Let’s look first at the mechanics of an online tournament. We’re seeing pretty clearly that at any major event, single-flighting is the way to go. You could possibly argue this, but even if you were to win that argument, everything I’ll be saying here still holds, with a slight adjustment of arithmetic.
To conduct an LD round at the circuit level, it is expected that teams have 30 minutes prep time. Then there’s showing up in the e-room, and 15 minutes (I’m being generous here, but I’ve run a few tournaments where I’ve seen that that generosity is not misplaced) of tech-check time, email chain setup, etc. The round itself, max, is about 65 minutes, allowing for some tech issues and that the judge might want to think for a minute or two about the decision. That gets us to 30+15+65= 110 minutes. (If you double this and think about it, you’ll realize that 2 LD rounds > 1 CX round, which is why I’m using LD as the example.)
Pairing a round with MJP can take up to half an hour. (A 240 cap means 120 rounds.) This assumes that you are not just blindly following tabroom, which is less than desirable. For one thing, we usually set 2-3 matches preferable to 1-2s, which tabroom can’t do. We really want bubble rounds to be advantaged as much as possible, which tabroom is pretty good at, but once you’ve addressed the 1-2/2-3 issue, you can usually improve bubbles a little bit from there because of the resulting judge changes. If you threw in per-round obligations—which, thankfully, we’re not using anywhere at virtual tournaments—that would make things take even longer. Let’s allow about a half hour from the last ballot in to the posting of the next round. 110+30 = 140. Or, in human terms two hours and twenty minutes.
Let’s say we want five rounds a day. That would be 5 * 140 = 700 = around 11 and a half hours. Since shit happens, let’s round it up, and say that 5 rounds a day takes 12 hours. You could round it down if you want. But a looser schedule means the odd bathroom break and quick meals.
So, if you start at 9 in the morning, you end at 9 at night, maybe somewhere before nine if you’re lucky. If you start at 8, you end at 8. If you start at 10 or 11, you end at 10 or 11.
Just for reference, IRL tournaments usually also run about 12 hours, if their schedules are rough, and fewer hours if they’re trying to be humane. I’ve been to tournaments where the days were even longer. (Being in tab, btw, means they’re longer still, since you start and end before everyone else, but admittedly it’s not quite as hard as being in all those rounds consecutively during that long day.)
Getting to the point, a couple more things. Everyone, presumedly, is debating at home. The vast majority of PF judges are, presumedly, parents. Every individual in a round needs three essentials: at least one unique device, good internet access, and an undisturbed setting. And here’s where we start getting into trouble. The demands on a student’s home (magnified when that student’s parent is judging) can challenge the three essentials, and I would suggest that these challenges are directly related to the financial situation of that home. The greater the family income, the lesser the challenges. Everybody has their own room, their own computer, the latest zippy mesh wifi, debater downstairs, daddy judge upstairs, no siblings, no distractions? Happiness. Start eating away at that, happiness not so much.
Oh yeah. One more thing. There’s a pandemic going on. Unemployment is through the roof. At the same time many employed people are working from home hogging tech resources. You can add to this whatever, but it cannot be ignored. It’s what started this whole thing in the first place.
So let’s look at virtual tournaments. One of the great opportunities virtuality gives us is the removal of travel and lodging expenses. This is a great leveler. On paper, this means that anyone can attend a tournament anywhere. My hope, and the direction I’m giving my tournament runners, is that we can open things up primarily to economically underserved programs that would normally not be able to attend. We prioritized the waitlists at Bronx exactly that way. This year we will see teams that, sadly, will probably never come again. That means that some teams will finally get a chance in an otherwise rough year to do some circuit debate. Given the numbers we’ve been seeing, I’m guessing they’re champing at the bit.
At the same time, these teams that I’m championing are the most likely to have the greatest challenges with those three essentials mentioned above. It was no great stretch to decide early on—and not just me, but plenty of other coaches as well—that if hardships occurred, the greatest hardships would occur at night. The decision to try to get tournaments over by 8:00 if possible, 9:00 at the latest, was an easy one to reach. (Note that PF, without the extra pre-round prep, will take less than the full 12 hours, but if you have roughly 600 rounds happening during any given time slot at a tournament, don’t count on things going smoothly all day. That never happens IRL, so why should it happen virtually? Throw in one complicated rules challenge, and the best laid plans…)
When we said earlier that virtual tournaments remove travel and lodging expenses, allowing anyone theoretically to attend a tournament anywhere, we weren’t suggesting that somehow virtuality eliminates geography per se. Geography, and time zones, remain fixed. So what about teams that aren’t in the same time zone? Most of those will progressively be starting an hour earlier per zone, up to three hours for Pacific Time. That is, a 9:00 start Eastern Time is a 6:00 start Pacific Time. Granted, that sucks. A 10:00 start Eastern Time is 7:00 in Malibu, which isn’t all that great either. But what’s worse is that the end is now 10:00 p.m. in Miami. Adjustment further makes things even worse. An 8:00 a.m. start in Oakland is an 11:00 finish in Boston.
Conversely, a tournament with a Pacific Time start of 8:00 a.m., say, starts and ends at the opposite 11:00 a.m. and p.m. in New York. The only way that New Yorkers or Floridians could realistically attend California tournaments is if those tournaments were to start at 6:00 in the morning. Which is what the Californians are objecting to with the New York 9:00 Eastern time starts. Let’s face it, bubbeleh, the Californians ain’t gonna do that. None of them. Period. End of story. Yet I hear that they’re whining that New York won’t do it for them?
Get [expletive deleted] real.
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